Skip to content

Community

Challenging The Oil Industry Through Community Action

The Hoima-Kaiso-Tonya highway connects the Ugandan fishing town of Kaiso to Hoima town, the headquarters of the Bunyoro Kingdom and Hoima District. Kaiso is on the south-eastern edge of Lake Mwitanzige, in a region with an estimated potential three billion barrels of crude oil. The Hoima-Kaiso-Tonya road was built to enable access to the lake for oil prospecting and as an investment for future petroleum production, so the residents call it “Oil Road”. For many, however, the road takes away more than it brings. To carve out space for the road, the Uganda National Roads Authority took land from Kaiso residents. Valuation and compensation, handled by an outside consultant, were arbitrary and low (going by the number of doors on a house for example), without taking full account of past investments and future livelihood losses.

Twelve Reasons The Glass Is 1% Full

The damage COVID-19 is wreaking—in terms of deaths, sickness, business closures, unemployment, and misery—is incalculable. But this crisis is changing the world in subtle ways that may ultimately improve our lives. So…in the spirit of Winston Churchill, who once implored not to let a good crisis go to waste, here are the positives I’m observing. (1) Resilience – Never again will a sober economic developer argue that local resilience and self-reliance do not matter. Crises like this one remind us that a community with a rich diversity of businesses will survive a disaster better than one completely dependent on the outside. (2) Local Investment – Wall Street is toast (again). Even after a few positive days, the market has lost nearly a third of its peak value earlier in the year. Once families assess the damage to their life savings, I suspect millions will start thinking more seriously about how to reinvest in local businesses, projects, and people.

Reclaim The Block Urges Invest In Community, Not In Police

In dramatic effect, a Minneapolis resident dumps a bag of money onto a podium during public comments at the final City Council meeting on the 2020 budget last month. The person with them, who identified himself as David, is addressing the council members. “This is $193.40,” David says, then begins to explain that the money represents the $193 million budget Mayor Jacob Frey proposed to give the Minneapolis Police Department in 2020, more than one-third of the city’s general fund.

Forget Billionaires: Let’s Build Our Own System To Fund The Transformation Of Society

“Gone to the Dogs,” Paul Higgins’ canine-friendly café in Carlisle, may seem an unlikely place to look for inspiration in transforming the ways we think about funding for social change. But through ‘pay-it-forward’ fundraising and ‘creative up-cycling’ to re-use resources, Higgins has made the café a center for community in which money builds connection instead of division - a radical reversal of the inequalities that lie at the heart of big philanthropy, foreign aid and government contracting.

Amazing Things Happened When 206 Ugly Vacant Lots In Philly Were Landscaped

Almost one in five American adults report some form of mental illness; more than 16 million adults experience depression alone every year. Yet patient mental health services only account for an estimated 5 percent of total medical care spending in the United States. Noting that “spending time and living near green spaces have been associated with various improved mental health outcomes, including less depression, anxiety, and stress,” a group of researchers from the University of Pennsylvania set out to determine if by changing the places near where people live, they could affect change in mental health outcomes. Their conclusion may come as little surprise to those of who know the health benefits of green space: “Greening vacant urban land significantly reduces feelings of depression and improves overall mental health for the surrounding residents.”

Chicago-Based Assata’s Daughters Announces Food Justice Through Gardening Project

Assata’s Daughters is a Chicago-based collective that embraces a Black radical perspective to serve their Washington Park community. One of their newest programs is a food justice-oriented garden. Members will provide food to the community, share knowledge about gardening and conservation, and teach “the importance of self-sustainment as a tool of resistance.” They also just announced a free farm stand and a partnership with a nearby corner store to provide free produce to their neighbors all summer. As Blavity noted in their report on the initiative, increasing access to fresh, nutrient-rich foods is key for Black communities, which are often disproportionately affected by food deserts. After cyber-sharing their wishlist for the garden project earlier this week, Assata’s Daughters announced on Tuesday that each item on it had been ordered and sent.

Pennsylvania Community Finds Its Bearings In Trump Era

TITUSVILLE, PENNSYLVANIA — Shoehorned between the state line and the Allegheny River in Pennsylvania’s northwest corner, the city of Titusville is as red as America gets, a place where virtually every one of its 5,601 residents identified his or her race as “white” on the 2010 U.S. Census, and a few storefront windows, rather  bewilderingly, display Confederate flags and “Trump: Make America Great Again” campaign banners even now, more than a year after the 2016 presidential election. Unsurprisingly, African-Americans across the state, if they’ve heard of it at all, tend to view the bucolic enclave and its environs with some trepidation, peppering their goodbyes with so many warnings to “be careful” and “be safe” that black students enrolled at the University of Pittsburgh’s feeder campus in Titusville often joke that their parents think that Crawford County is a combat zone in Kabul or Fallujah.

Lifting Up Community Voices To Tackle Injustice

Lillie A. Estes calls herself a "community strategist." Others see her as a force of nature. She has lived in Richmond, Virginia, for 35 years, where she builds and develops innovative alliances between organizations and people. Estes is well-known and respected both in the public housing project where she lives and by many public officials in Richmond. She has been a pioneer in race reconciliation work in the heart of the Confederacy, and is on what she calls a "spiritual journey" to improve her community. This began with her first efforts as a high school student in Newport News, Virginia, and as an active member of the NAACP Youth Council.

Community Members Defy El Cajon Ordinance Against Feeding Homeless

By Bella Ross for The Daily Aztec - “We call it ‘Break the Ban,’” said Mark Lane, a 1989 San Diego State alumnus and the primary organizer of the event. On Oct. 27, the city of El Cajon passed an ordinance prohibiting “food-sharing” events in public spaces, including city parks. Lane said members of anywhere between 30 and 40 organizations came out with the goal of standing against the ordinance. “The goal, number one, is to get them to overturn the ban because it’s a discriminatory ban and it’s a ridiculous ban,” Lane said. According to a news release from the city, the ban on food sharing was in response to the growing Hepatitis A outbreak — an outbreak that is concentrated among the homeless population. “With the trolley system, the homeless population is pretty transient, so it flows throughout the entire city area,” El Cajon Mayor Bill Wells said. “People that were homeless in San Diego today might be homeless in El Cajon tomorrow.” The mayor said there have been a concerning number of Hepatitis A cases in El Cajon. “All we’re saying is, if you have a feeding program that’s going on in the parks, we’d rather you did that in a kitchen and not in the parks because the people that feed people in the parks don’t have food handlers permits and they’re putting boxes of food on the ground.,” Wells said.

How Ceasefire Has Changed This Organizer And Baltimore

By Lisa Snowden-McCray for Baltimore Beat. Baltimore, MD - Just a few days after the second 72-hour Baltimore Ceasefire weekend, which ran from Nov. 3-5, Erricka Bridgeford and I are sitting in her car in her old Rosemont neighborhood escaping the cold and rain. She has a bit of a cough and she’s just off a speaking engagement at the Community College of Baltimore County’s Essex campus, but Bridgeford has gamely agreed to take a few moments to share her thoughts about the second ceasefire, meant to pause the violence in the city and connect with and create community.

Using Public Spaces To Organize Communities

By Sam Allen for Transition Network - One summer night in 2014, Lucille Burns, a 34-year-old mother, was shot and killed while trying to break up a fight. Tamar Manasseh, a mother of two who had already seen too much gun violence in her Chicago neighborhood of Englewood, was devastated. Then she sprang into action. As she wrote in her recent op-ed for Truthout, “I didn’t know what I was going to do. I had a theory, though: If enough adults, mainly moms, sat outside in lawn chairs and eye-catching shirts, violence would cease. I knew how much my own teenagers hated to be watched and how different their behavior was when they were, so I figured all teenagers would pretty much react the same way to supervision. So, I started my project: Mothers Against Senseless Killings. Every evening, we set up our lawn chairs and a barbecue grill on the block where that shooting took place — a block that had also seen high levels of gun violence in the past. We fed not only the bodies of the people in the community, but also their souls.” In the three years since MASK was formed, not a single act of violence has taken place on their block – not even a fistfight. Volunteers sign up to feed the block every summer night, and special events draw crowds to the corner, like the MASK Back-to-School Block Party with backpack giveaways, DJs, barbers, braiders, face painters, and tattoo removal services.

Perverse Mobility: From BaltimoreGhetto To HabanaStation

By Cliff DuRand for The Center for Global Justice. Last year’s film hit in Cuba was “HabanaStation”, directed by Ian Padron. It is the touching story of a developing friendship between two boys from very different social backgrounds: one from a materially comfortable family living in Miramar, the other living in a “poor” barrio of Havana. For many foreign views of the film it is a shocking window into economic inequality in Cuba. For Cubans, it is a welcome public acknowledgement of a well-known reality. But the comments I’ve seen on “HabanaStation” overlook what makes it a powerful revolutionary film.

New Economic Vision: Amish Culture, Occupy & Start-Ups

By Alexa Clay for Nation of Change. If markets and industrial production have become separated from society and community, the task now seems to be figuring out how to envelop production within community. Localizing production in community might lead to a certain sacrifice of market efficiency, but would also offer greater flexibility and enhanced quality of life, and would strengthen social ties and community resilience. Ultimately, to reimagine production, we have a variety of models to choose from. Culture is no longer contingent on particular ethnographic contexts. Rather, practices from indigenous peoples, protest movements, entrepreneurial startup hubs, intentional communities, and even religious traditions require remixing by emergent forms of community around the world. While this remixing might feel like a consumerist “pick and choose” approach, it’s also one of the quickest pathways I’ve identified for accelerating social change and building more resilient local economies and communities. Designing community around cultural hybridity gives us a much broader diversity from which to organize ourselves and foster a greater sense of belonging for very different types of people.

Woman Is Trying to Make World A Better Place, One Community Center At A Time

By Sarah Lazare for AlterNet - Five years ago, Janet Wilson was one of thousands of people who flocked to New York’s Zuccotti Park to participate in the Occupy Wall Street movement that would eventually sweep the country and the world. “It was life-changing to see people come together and pay attention to what was going on,” Wilson told AlterNet. “Young and old people were organizing together, and people were actually talking to each other. It gave me chills.” Like countless others, Wilson sought to take the lessons she learned with her after she left New York. For her, this was buying an RV and traveling to 160 Occupy camps across the country.

In A Broke And Crumbling City, This Woman Is Building An Urban Paradise

By Kate Abbey-Lambertz for The Huffington Post - DETROIT — In a neighborhood that has lost its school, library, streetlights, many businesses and a huge chunk of its population, one woman is transforming her half-abandoned block into a community hub, where there are books to borrow, people playing in the park and lights on in the darkness. Shamayim “Shu” Harris lives in a house on Avalon Street in Highland Park, a small city surrounded by Detroit. Blighted and broke, Highland Park faces challenges similar to Detroit’s, but lacks the public attention and private investment that has boosted Detroit in recent years.
assetto corsa mods

Urgent End Of Year Fundraising Campaign

Online donations are back! Keep independent media alive. 

Due to the attacks on our fiscal sponsor, we were unable to raise funds online for nearly two years.  As the bills pile up, your help is needed now to cover the monthly costs of operating Popular Resistance.

Urgent End Of Year Fundraising Campaign

Online donations are back! 

Keep independent media alive. 

Due to the attacks on our fiscal sponsor, we were unable to raise funds online for nearly two years.  As the bills pile up, your help is needed now to cover the monthly costs of operating Popular Resistance.

Sign Up To Our Daily Digest

Independent media outlets are being suppressed and dropped by corporations like Google, Facebook and Twitter. Sign up for our daily email digest before it’s too late so you don’t miss the latest movement news.